Tales from the Dawn #3: "A Question of Life" (Hermes)

[Iscah]

For me it would be similar to people getting upset that others aren't upset about the Titanic sinking at the end of watching any movie or mini series about the boat. We know it has to happen or it becomes an AU.

That's a good analogy, and perhaps even more for the mindset that has to go into the writing of a plot like this. The boat has to sink in the end, and the writers can only adjust the details around it.

They're not going to decide "oh, we like our characters too much and don't want to kill them off, so we'll write an ending where they dodge the iceberg and all live happily after". Firstly, the characters only exist to serve the plot of the ship sinking, and secondly, even if they did safely reach port there's no guarantee their lives would go well afterwards.

I also think that – whether we believe it as an audience or not – the writers might be coming from the concept that Venat was correct (and not vastly overspeculating) in her belief that her society was on the verge of destroying itself anyway, in which case there would be no kindness in creating a second timeline where they are about to run themselves off a cliff and go through a different variety of suffering and total society death.

I don't think it particularly plausible but I have the same opinion of the fate of the other worlds that was handed to us in the story as a factual thing that inevitably happened to all societies. And if that was the mindset of the writers then there was really no good reason to create a split timeline where the options are "the Sundering" and "nothing survives".

I am interested in what happens at the end of Pandeamonium as Elidibus did mention a few times a promise they made to someone about something.

I still prefer to interpret that as the oath he must have sworn upon joining the Convocation, as that is among the remaining shreds of his memories that we glimpse during 5.3. Everything he is doing is focused on fulfilling his mission, which stems from those promises he made to act in accordance with his position as Elidibus – and by the end he can't even remember who he made the promise to, only that he needs to follow it.

I actually will be disappointed if it gets retconned into Pandæmonium.

Also, Venat was operating with future knowledge that Zodiark would eventually die and the souls inside him freed, too.

That's a good point. Assuming she hits a point where she is resigned to being stuck on her foretold path, she knows that part of that sequence of events will free the souls eventually. She's not dooming them to be trapped eternally.

I assume the devs thought that if it was outright said that the 3rd sacrifices were sapient, there would be no morally grey area anymore and Venat would be easily declared the heroine and the Convocation the villains, I guess?

That could be the case. I feel like whatever is going on with their reluctance to explain, it either comes down to not having decided or some kind of ongoing creative argument where different people want it to go different ways and they've decided the solution is to not tackle it, regardless of what that does to the narrative.

I dunno, Emet-Selch's line about whether half of the sundered would sacrifice their lives for the other kind of loses its weight if what he actually meant was "would half of you agree to be temporarily inconvienced until the other half figures out how to fix it?"

It kind of cheapens the first and second sacrifice if the ancients going into it always knew it was a temporary affair. I always figured that the third sacrifice was something that the remaining ancients came up with after being incapable of accepting the loss of the ones that died to bring about Zodiark.

I agree on that. At the point of Shadowbringers there was a lot we didn't know (and the devs possibly hadn't invented) about exactly how souls work, and the sacrifices within Zodiark specifically. The closest analogue we had was the Ananta queen trying to revive her daughter through Lakshmi's power, in which case we were told that her soul was unreclaimable, so it seemed as if the entire idea of "retrieving the souls from Zodiark" might be a similarly futile endeavour that the Ascians had fixated on all this time. The full tragedy would be that after all they did, their friends were still utterly lost to them.

I don't think we even knew for certain that Zodiark contained souls specifically, only aether. I had in mind that it might have only been their body-aether that went into Zodiark while their souls were released to the Lifestream, though I'm not sure if there was a specific quote to imply that.